Getting Deeper Into Deep Learning (Series)

Part 1: Ready. Set. Go!

In my recent article on the need for Africa to get involved in the global data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) race, I highlighted some promising initiatives from MEST Africa and minoHealth. Under the impulse of Mr. Michael Leventhal, Senior Faculty for the MEST training programme, we recently started a recurring AI meetup in Accra, where we meet on a bi-weekly basis (initially weekly) to learn about AI through community learning. The structure of the meetup is simple: participants volunteer to lead tutorials on specific topics or present on the applications of AI and machine learning (ML) in a specific sector or industry. Most of the times, there are also interesting discussions on how AI can be applied to the African context and deployed in local startups.

I have personally enjoyed each of the sessions and I have so far volunteered to lead two of them. The first one was about the activation and loss function in a neural network (please bear with me if you have no idea what I am talking about, the aim of this post is not to dive into the technical aspect and jargon…yet!). The second one was a practical step-by-step tutorial on how to build a simple neural network for a binary classification problem in Python with Keras. You can find more about the example here.

The meetup, the curriculum at MEST, and my personal interests have pushed me the point of really wanting to finally move beyond the buzzwords and theoretical knowledge of AI and its subdisciplines and to get deeper into practically learning and applying it. This brings me to the point of this post, which is the first of a series of posts in which I will be sharing with you the insights, challenges, and opportunities of my AI and ML learning journey.

Introducing the ‘Getting Deeper Into Deep Learning” Series

Udacity PyTorch Challenge Badge

“Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew.” — Cicely Tyson

I recently applied for the Udacity PyTorch Challenge and got into it! The challenge will go on for about 2 months, starting from Friday, 9 November 2018. I am one of the 10,000 individuals from around the world that got an opportunity to take part into the challenge, with the end goal of being among the 300 top performers that will receive a scholarship for the Udacity Deep Learning Nanodegree Program. The Nanodegree which is valued at $999 USD will be fully sponsored by Facebook for the 300 recipients. To find more about PyTorch, the challenge, and the program, please check out the three links in this paragraph.

As mentioned above, I will be having a series of posts over the next couples of weeks to document the important steps of the journey and share any relevant details with you. Whether you are just curious about the field of AI/ML/DL, or you have been contemplating the possibilities of getting started learning, I am hoping through this series to inspire you, and to give you a glimpse into what it might actually look like to learn and apply deep learning. I am still trying to figure out if it will be valuable and feasible for me to post on a weekly or bi-weekly basis; keep an eye on this space and expect my next post to hit you in about 2 weeks for the latest (maybe 1 week), I will definitely keep you posted.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any comment, question or inquiry. You can also get in touch with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

May the peace be with you until we dive deeper into deep learning together!